“#DanhVo’s quiet but exhaustive research, methods of salvaging and collecting and his obsession with American cultural production, speak to the transactional procedures that underlie the formation of art and identity.”—@frieze_magazine. Learn more and plan your visit this weekend at guggenheim.org/danhvo.
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To our followers in Spain—“Esther Ferrer. Intertwined Spaces” is now on view at @museoguggenheim. One of Spain’s leading pioneers of action art, Ferrer considers performance to be the “art that involves time and space with the presence of the audience—an audience that is made of participants rather than viewers.” Most of the works in this exhibition have never been shown before, and will be activated in special ways through performances and interactions with visitors. Learn more at estherferrer.guggenheim-bilbao.eus #EstherFerrer#EFerrerGuggenheimBilbao#GuggenheimBilbao

We’re giving away a pair of tickets to the #YCCParty on April 12! Visit us in March and share a photo of you and a friend at the Guggenheim tagged with #YCCPartyGiveaway for a chance to win! #FrankLloydWrightFridays
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The YCC Party supports the acquisition of new works by emerging artists for the Guggenheim's collection. Submissions close on Saturday, March 31, 11:59 pm EDT. Full terms and conditions at guggenheim.org/terms-conditions/social-media. No purchase necessary. #Guggenheim#YCCParty#Giveaway
Photos: @benhiderimages and @scottruddevents

Can you imagine the Guggenheim in any other space? Before and during the years when the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building was under construction, the museum occupied two different townhouses on Manhattan's Upper East Side—first, a building at 1071 Fifth Avenue that was eventually replaced by the current structure, and then as Wright's construction began, the Guggenheim moved into a Beaux Arts townhouse at 7 East 72nd Street. Solomon R. Guggenheim's art collection was displayed there from 1956 until the new building's opening in 1959. Read the full blog post at guggenheim.org/blogs. #TBT#Guggenheim#FrankLloydWright

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Photos from left to right: Interior of the townhouse at 7 East 72nd Street; Installation view of "Sculptures and Drawings From Seven Sculptors," at the townhouse at 7 East 72nd Street.
Photos: Robert E. Mates

Can you name #5WomenArtists? We're joining @womeninthearts to call attention to gender imbalance in the art world by highlighting work by women artists from our collection and 2018 exhibition programs. #HilmaafKlint began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet af Klint never exhibited her groundbreaking paintings and convinced the world was not yet ready to understand them, stipulated that they not be shown for twenty years following her death. Her decision to avoid the male-dominated art world, her deeply held spiritual commitments, and her delayed entry into art history give us an opportunity to rethink the story of modernism, while expanding the cannon. Hilma af Klint," opening October 12, will be the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the artist, offering an unprecedented opportunity to experience af Klint's stunning and long-under recognized artistic achievements. Learn more about the upcoming exhibition at guggenheim.org/hilmaafklint. #WomensHistoryMonth#Guggenheim

Artist #DanhVo recalls taking his father to the Hôtel Majestic in Paris, where the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973. The ill-fated agreement between the United States and the governments of North and South Vietnam was executed under three ornate chandeliers, now displayed in “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away.” Learn more at guggenheim.org/danhvo.
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Happy #PiDay! Guggenheim architect Frank Lloyd Wright thought in curves and straight lines—triangles, circles, ovals, squares, and spirals—as well as shapes adapted from nature. Over 90 feet above the rotunda floor of the museum, and spanning 58 feet, the building’s circular skylight, or “oculus,” is one of the most iconic in the world. The domed window is made up of 12 “pie slices” and one polygonal cap where they all come together.
_#Guggenheim#FrankLloydWright#Architecture David Heald

The #YCCParty is on April 12! Guggenheim collection artist Naama Tsabar (@naamatsabar) will curate site-specific performances in our iconic rotunda, which she describes as feminist interventions—“I chose to highlight the people that inspire me and make up my creative community, they are predominantly female, that is the landscape I choose to live in.” Don’t miss this one-night-only event!

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All proceeds directly support the acquisition of new works by emerging artists for the Guggenheim's collection. Purchase tickets at guggenheim.org/yccparty. #Guggenheim

Our updated line of #Guggenheim-inspired tea and tabletop porcelain is here! Shop now at guggenheimstore.org/1959_modern. Interested in how the Guggenheim Store revived this Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired design? Read our blog at guggenheim.org/blogs.
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“Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away” is a @nytimes Critic’s Pick! “The items spiraling up the Guggenheim ramp encircle us with entwining histories of love, loss, power, violence — and the post-colonial anger of belonging to a culture long on the receiving end of history.”—Roberta Smith (@robertasmithnyt). Learn more and plan your visit this weekend at guggenheim.org/danhvo.
__#DanhVo#Guggenheim Photo: David Heald

Self-identifying as a “visual activist,” Zanele Muholi makes searing photographic portraits and self-portraits that give form to her advocacy on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community in her native South Africa. Her black and white images, celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects, is in direct response to the radical disconnect in post-apartheid South Africa between the equality promised by its 1996 Constitution and the often violent bigotry toward members of the LGBTI community. Even though South Africa made same-sex marriage legal in 2006, violence against queer women is still prevalent. Muholi’s “Faces and Phases” (2006-) celebrates Black lesbians in an ongoing series of photographic portraits that, by now, number more than three hundred. Three examples in the Guggenheim collection—“Xana Nyilenda, Newtown, Johannesburg,” 2011; “Zimaseka ‘Zim’ Salusalu, Gugulethu, Cape Town,” 2011; and “‘TK’ Thembi Khumalo, BB Section Umlazi Township, Durban,” 2012—evidence how the artist, in a demonstration of compassion and conviction, brings out the profound humanness of each person.
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Thank you for following my takeover today. To learn more, explore the Guggenheim Collection online at guggenheim.org/collection-online—Nancy Spector (@nespector), Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator.

Argentinian-born artist, Amalia Pica explores the politicization of communication in its most nuanced forms in her multidisciplinary practice. Her 2013 performance-based work “A ∩ B ∩ C” (read as A intersection B intersection C) draws upon the fact that, during the 1970s, Argentina’s military junta forbade Venn diagrams and the related concept of intersection from being taught in elementary school, viewing it as potentially subversive. There was a belief that it could model forms of collectivity, of eliding difference for the greater good of public opinion and through that, dissent. In “A ∩ B ∩ C,” performers manipulate the translucent colored shapes surrounding the room on specially built shelves. In doing so, they produce geometric configurations that use layering and confluence as a symbol for ideas of collaboration and community building. Replaced on the shelves at each performance’s conclusion, the shapes seem infused with a new communicative potential.#GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#AmaliaPica@amaliapica

Tania Bruguera’s incisive performance works do not just represent politically motivated social infractions—like censorship, deportation, and racial stereotyping—they provoke the political. As live art, her projects directly engage with the world and try to enact substantive change. In 2009, Bruguera presented the performance “Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana version)” at the Havana Biennial in which she created a momentary forum for free speech in a country that does not allow it. Visitors to the exhibition were invited, one-by-one, to stand at a podium and speak uncensored for 60 seconds before being escorted off the stage by actors dressed in military garb. During that instant of free expression each participant wore a white dove on their shoulder in allusion to the one that landed—in a highly choreographed act of political theater—on Fidel Castro during his victory speech after the triumph of the 1959 revolution in Cuba. In December 2014, Bruguera was arrested for attempting to restage “Tatlin’s Whisper #6” in Havana’s Revolutionary Square after President Obama had renewed relations with Cuba following 54 years of hostility. Her passport was revoked and she remained under house arrest for months. Bruguera’s provocation and the consequences she suffered were culturally specific but her art resonates globally, especially today with the renewed rise of the authoritarian state. #GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#TaniaBruguera@taniabruguera

Juliana Huxtable’s multi-disciplinary practice is a radical example of intersectionality. Born intersex into a conservative Southern Black family, she was raised a male but transitioned in college. Her work as a DJ, poet, artist and activist probes ideas of inclusion and identity, blasting open preconceptions about race and gender binarism. The photographic self-portrait “Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm),” 2015—showing her distinctly feminized, yet chromatically altered body in a fictional landscape—pays homage to Afrofuturism. Its title references the doomsday scenario predicting that a planet known as Nibiru will collide with the Earth in the early 21st century. In her “Untitled (Casual Power),” 2015, Huxtable fluidly combines her writing and her visual art with a prose poem that calls out hip-hop star Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and science fiction writer Octavia Butler, along with references to events that have scarred the Black community, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s attempts to suppress the Civil Rights movement during the 1960s and the crack epidemic of the ’80s to targeted gentrification of the ’90s. #GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#JulianaHuxtable@julianahuxtable

Simone Leigh’s broad-ranging interests in ethnography, modernism, the African diaspora, and feminism cohere in her series of ceramic portrait busts, of which “Georgia Mae,” 2017 is a part. These sculptures, like all of Leigh’s work, celebrate the Black female body as a “repository of lived experience” and interrogate how it has been depicted and defined throughout American history. This abstracted torso is crafted from glazed terra cotta with tiny porcelain roses forming the headpiece.#GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#SimoneLeigh@simoneyvetteleigh

American artist, Lorna Simpson has been giving form to Black female subjectivity in her art for the past three decades. Her early photo-based work drew upon the relation between image and text exploited in Conceptual art, but her subject matter uniquely unpacks the experience of being an African-American woman in a white supremacist culture. “Flipside,” 1991, pairs the photo of an African mask and a Black woman with close-cropped hair, both facing away from the camera, refusing any engagement with its lens. The accompanying text reads: the neighbors were suspicious of her hairstyle. Different meanings emerge from the title and the imagery: the curves on the mask echo that of the ’60s hairdo known as the flip, which then evokes the era of intense civil rights activism in the United States, but also invokes the B-side of a 45 vinyl record, which is commonly thought to be the lesser of the two songs. Simpson never dictates meaning; rather, she lets the ideas and provocations in the work ricochet back and forth, inviting the viewer to enter where they may. #GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#LornaSimpson@lornasimpson

Doris Salcedo makes searing sculptures from everyday items that bear witness to the atrocities enacted by the government of her native Colombia. A delicate carpet of sutured rose petals, “A Flor de Piel,” 2011-12, pays silent tribute to a female nurse who was violently tortured and killed for being part of the resistance. In earlier, furniture-based sculptures, such as “Untitled,” 2008, the voids of which are filled with concrete, Salcedo represents the cultural muting enacted by an authoritarian government that punishes dissent and disappears its detractors. For Salcedo, art is an act of protest and, perhaps, more importantly, an attempt at healing. Her quiet, aesthetic activism speaks volumes today as fascistic governments around the world are fortifying their grip on power, threatening the very civil liberties that allow free expression to flourish. #GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#DorisSalcedo

As a Palestinian artist living in exile, Mona Hatoum is attuned to the nuanced differences between migration, immigration, deportation and resettlement, which are used interchangeably but are distinct in their separate realities. While her art never specifies meaning, she draws upon her own experience in a world where ideas of departure, return, and what constitutes home are contingent. Home is a contested site for Hatoum; the reality of its fragile state plagues her work. The installation, “Home,” 1999, embodies this tension. An array of kitchen utensils on a table is connected via copper wire that conducts electricity to turn light bulbs on according to the fluctuating current. This is visible only through a fence of stretched wire designed to protect from the live cables that crackle with the modulating light. The kitchen is rendered as a kind of death trap, exactly the opposite of its customary (and feminized) function. In “Impenetrable,” 2009, Hatoum uses barbed wire—seductive from a distance in its seeming fragility but on close examination, viscerally threatening—to create a floating cube. To enter it would mean intense bodily harm. Yet the idea beckons. Though it sways in space as viewers encircle its form; “Impenetrable” is just that. You can see through to the other side, an invitation to traverse its grid, but the structure, in the end, does not yield. #GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#MonaHatoum

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, Nancy Spector (@nespector), Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator is taking over our account —
Hello to all Guggenheim followers and friends. I’m taking over our account today to share with you the museum’s commitment to an intersectional feminism in our programming, our collection, and, most importantly, our mission. Even though our first director, Hilla Rebay, was a woman, it was Jenny Holzer’s ground-breaking retrospective in 1989 that launched our curatorial efforts to very consciously exhibit and collect work by female and female-identified artists. Holzer’s site-specific L.E.D. sign encapsulated all of her text-based work to date, including her celebrated “Truisms.” In 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (@museoguggenheim) commissioned a permanently sited installation by the artist with texts in English, Spanish, and Basque that speaks to the universality of loss and mourning. And in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (@guggenheim_venice), one of Holzer’s carved benches sits in the enclosed garden. Holzer’s incisive aphorisms resonate deeply today. Her adage: “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise” has become the perfect rallying cry for the urgent #MeToo and #TimesUp movements that underscore the prevalence of sexual harassment in our culture and the fact that it can no longer be tolerated. Art (and the museums that exhibit it) should not just reflect upon the social ills of our time; it should model solutions and be part of the change we so sorely need. #GuggenheimTakeover#IWD2018#InternationalWomensDay#GuggenheimCollection#JennyHolzer

Watch the creation of #DanhVo’s “Fabulous Muscles Take My Breath Away” (2018). Vo’s father, Phung Vo, hand-etched this window with elegant lettering of his own design. Phung Vo is a frequent collaborator in the artist’s projects and has contributed his skilled penmanship to many of the artworks and site-specific drawings on view in the museum’s rotunda. The phrase, “Fabulous Muscles Take My Breath Away,” refers both to the 1980s hit from Top Gun and to “Fabulous Muscles,” a 2004 song with a haunting melody and devastating lyrics by the band Xiu Xiu (@xiuxiuforlife). Learn more at guggenheim.org/danhvo.
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If you guessed Ana Mendieta's "Untitled (Silueta Series)" (1978) for today's #GuessTheArtist, you're right! A Cuban exile, Mendieta came to the United States in 1961, leaving much of her family behind—a traumatic cultural separation that had a huge impact on her art. Mendieta's "Silueta" series started in 1973, using a typology of abstracted feminine forms and by 1978, they gave way to ancient goddess forms carved into rock, shaped from sand, or incised in clay beds. Like this series, Mendieta's works live on through films and photographs, haunting documents of her ephemeral attempts to see out, in her words, that "one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy” .

April 4—writer, teacher, curator, and organizer Irit Rogoff explores the “research turn” within art and curating at the Thirtieth Annual Hilla Rebay Lecture. Learn more and RSVP for updates at guggenheim.org/calendar.

Our new exhibition collection featuring products inspired by “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away” is here! Browse the collection including the richly illustrated exhibition catalogue, conceived in close collaboration with the artist at guggenheimstore.org.
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This week's #GuessTheArtist—this artist focused on the dialogue between her own body and the landscape, documented through photography, film, video, and performances. Comment your best guess below and we'll share the answer by the end of the day. Good luck!

“Objects have all these possibilities of meanings and readings and they all exist simultaneously. And it’s in these contradictions that objects turn out to be beautiful.”—artist #DanhVo in @Cultured_Mag. Explore “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away” featuring installations, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper created by Vo over the past 15 years. Plan your visit at guggenheim.org/danhvo.
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Artwork: Installation view: Danh Vo وادي الحجارة, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, November 13, 2014–February 25, 2015 Photo: Abigail Enzaldo and Emilio Bernabé García, courtesy Museo Jumex, Mexico City.

Do you love film? Join us on Saturdays this month for “Danh Vo Selects,” a film series hand-selected by the artist to accompany his exhibition “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away.” Each week, a selection of the following films will be screened: “The Exorcist” (1973), “Rosetta” (1999), and “The Ballad of Narayama” (1983). Free with museum admission. Learn more and view the schedule at guggenheim.org/films.
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Photo: Still from “The Exorcist” (1973), directed by William Friedkin. Courtesy of Warner Bros.